Does music matter?

The documentary "The Music Instinct" brings together scientists, scholars and musicians to explore the science of music:

Interested in doing a PhD in Amsterdam?

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) currently has a PhD fellowship available at the Faculty of Science starting on 1 September 2012. Applications are invited from excellent candidates wishing to conduct research in an area in which members of ILLC scientific staff affiliated with the Faculty of Science are active...

For more information, see here. Deadline for applications is 20 May 2012.

Baan in cognitieve muziekwetenschap? [Dutch]

Vorige week kwamen er drie part-time vacatures vrij bij muziekwetenschap Amsterdam. Een daarvan is op het gebied van de cognitieve muziekwetenschap. Deadline voor sollitaties: 31 Maart 2012.

Geïnteresseerd? Voor meer informatie, zie hier.

Working in the humanities, interested in cognition?

Tecumseh Fitch presenting at
SMART on April 20th, 2012

SMART Cognitive Science is an new initiative of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. It embodies lectures, meetings and discussions, offline and online, to highlight the important contributions to cognitive science from traditional humanities disciplines.

SMART is an acronym for Speech and language, Music, Art, Reasoning and Thought. These activities are organized in close collaboration with the Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam, in which also the Faculties of Science, Medicine, Social Science and Economics & Econometrics participate.

Some interesting upcoming SMART Cognitive Science Lectures are:

• Tuesday 20/3, 15h30 – 16h, P2.27, Anne Baker (Amsterdam), SMART Perspective on Language and Executive Function; followed from 16h-18h in the same room by a CSCA Lecture by Ianthi Tsimpli (Thessaloniki) on Signed and Spoken Language Asymmetries in a Polyglot-Savant 
• Friday 20/4, 16h-18h, UT3.01, Tecumseh Fitch (Vienna), Cognitive Overlap between Language and Music (see abstract)
• Friday 25/5, 16h-18h, UT3.01, Carel ten Cate (Leiden), On the linguistic abilities of songbirds 
• Friday 22/6, 16h-18h, Doelenzaal, Östen Dahl (Stockholm), How languages get complex 

For more information see here.

How do children learn and represent music?

Jeanne Bamberger

In the eighties of the last century there was an almost utopian vibe that the computer would change not only music, mathematics, linguistics and related fields, but also education. Special programming languages were developed that were aimed to resonate with the intuition of children (and adults) about a certain domain, be it mathematics, music, or language. It generated an enormous amount of ideas, especially at MIT, where for instance Jeanne Bamberger was for long professor of Music and Urban Education. The cognitivist underpinnings of her work marked a groundbreaking shift in the design of music education software, a field dominated at the time by programs influenced by behaviorist “skill and drill” theories of music learning and teaching. Influenced by the work of Seymour Papert on Logo (a lisp-like programming language designed for educational purposes), Jeanne set out to design project-based musical micro-worlds that researchers and teachers could use to help make children’s musical thinking, intuitions, and problem solving processes audible and visible.

Last month the peer-reviewed online journal Visions of Research in Music Education published a tribute to Jeanne Bamberger. See here for more information.

Bamberger, J. (1991/5) The Mind behind the Musical Ear: How Children Develop Musical Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bamberger, J. (2000) Developing Musical Intuitions: A Project-Based Introduction to Making and Understanding Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

Desain, P., and Honing, H. (1988). LOCO: A Composition Microworld in Logo. Computer Music Journal, 12 (3), 30-42. DOI: 10.2307/3680334

Honing, H. (1993). A microworld approach to the formalization of musical knowledge Computers and the Humanities, 27 (1), 41-47 DOI: 10.1007/BF01830716